How the enemy gets a vote: Fog-of-war, friction, and the cultural riverbanks of the Clausewitz landscape

Abstract

Institutions are not “simply” cognitive entities composed of shifting, tunable networked coalitions of cognitive subcomponents. Institutions are cultural artifacts that, through the epigenetic modes of historical trajectory and the Lamarckian heritage of doctrine, have distinct cultural identities. Individual sleep patterns, hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis and immune responses, and so on, are powerfully modulated by culture. Institutional responses to patterns of stress or affordance are no less culturally influenced, and, we suggest, using mathematical and statistical models based on the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories can be manipulated to punctuated failure by appropriate “messages.” Outcomes then revolve not only around the balance of effort and effect between combatants, but on the ability to generate and enlist fog-of-war and friction as effective weapons. However, cultural riverbanks work both ways, and the US national security enterprise remains severely constrained by its own set.